A complete monitor test in about five minutes
This page runs the checks that actually tell you something about a display, in the order a reviewer would run them. It works on a desktop monitor, a laptop panel, a tablet, a phone and most televisions with a browser, and every measurement happens in your own browser with nothing uploaded anywhere.
Before you start, set the monitor to the brightness you normally use, turn off any night light or blue light filter, and dim the room. A test run at maximum brightness in a pitch black room fails every monitor ever made, and a test run in direct sunlight passes every one of them.
The order to run things in
- Solid colours first. White finds dark faults, black finds bright ones, and the primaries isolate individual subpixels. This is the dead pixel test.
- Grey fields next. Uniformity, tinting and dirty screen effect all show on mid grey and nowhere else.
- Gradients and bars after that. Banding and gamma faults live here, in the transitions rather than the flat areas.
- Refresh rate, to confirm the panel and the cable are actually running at the rate you paid for rather than falling back to 60hz.
- Resolution, to confirm the panel is the size the listing claimed and that scaling is not quietly running it at something else.
- Ghosting last, because it is the one that needs motion and the one most affected by the overdrive setting in the monitor menu.
What counts as a fault and what does not
Most monitors have something. A single stuck pixel, a little edge bleed, some corner glow on an IPS panel and a slight warmth in one region are all within what manufacturers consider acceptable, and most warranty policies name a minimum number of dead pixels before they will act. What is worth pursuing is anything you can see during ordinary use: a bright dot in the middle of the screen, bleed that washes out a dark film, banding across a photograph, or a refresh rate that is not what the box said.
If you are testing hardware you are about to buy secondhand, run the colours and the resolution check before you hand over money. Those two catch most of what makes a used panel not worth buying.